In the used car market, views of the exterior of the car (but not usually the underside) are typically required by and provided to the buyer before consummating a transaction. High resolution images showing small flaws and damage to the vehicle are preferred. One method of making these images is to rotate the vehicle on a turntable and create a series of images against a consistent background. The images can be displayed and viewed in a manner to generate a virtual 360 degree tour of the vehicle.
The two problems with this approach are that a turntable for a vehicle is a heavy, expensive and complex piece of equipment, and that high resolution images require long delays to download—or cannot be downloaded and viewed by a potential vehicle purchaser without considerable bandwidth. An additional problem is that the uppermost side of a vehicle is often not shown unless a robot for moving the imaging device is used. See FSI Viewer (Neptunelabs Gmbh). These known methods are expensive and have serious disadvantages for performing the imaging of a vehicle.